Abstract -
As a product-centric DAO, the Product Workstream is accountable for a number of activities:
- strategic focus (discovering, cataloguing, and prioritizing feature/expansion/0-to-1 work).
- product ops system design & cross-workstream alignment on execution.
- Retaining/acquiring users.
- growing the FOX ecosystem with the DFC and putting the FOX token into the product
- speccing/launching new product lines, and achieving Shapeshift’s mission.
With the recent exit of Marketing, Product has stepped in to steward:
- The translations squads FOX compensation this month and continuing forward.
- Hosting DOT com on AWS, and migrating it to railway like everything else.
- negotiating and finalizign Discostu’s BD & comarketing work ( still in progress)
- Management of our PR firm contract
- Take over the foundation’s wind-down services that aren’t critical engineering functions.
Voting for the product workstream is recognizing the revenue/runway reality, seeing the potential we’ve already unlocked, and giving a thumbs up to keep pushing until this term ends. This is the last product renewal even remotely close to previous. If we get a chance to continue later in the year it will be in a different capacity. We’re taking the chance at the enormous potential with our recent velocity and aiming to succeed. There is too much potential to waste time on giving up.
Specification -
As of January we now run off of Prototype, POC, or biz case first initiative-driven-development. The “Why now?” and “what to build?” comes form tangible businesses we align on, not vague product docs that take forever to align on a weeks worth of engineering plumbing. Product will still own the day-to-day PM work, but we have additional scope so we can alleviate our USDC runway constraints.
We produce artifacts every office hours, giving a snapshot of business line performance and a high level overview of what’s going on. You can find the archive here.
See the retro post in the forum, the initiatives changes post, and the strategic lens for adaptive changes in our current situation. Product has adjusted how sees it’s role versus history, and how that handshakes with workstreams bringing it to life throughout the product suite.
Unlike last year, where we over indexed on optimism and saying no due to constraints, we now have 4 product lines and the workstreams goals are simple:
Sell the heck out of these products and grow our DAO’s revenue. We’d love to see 15% MOM growth in collective revenues.
Acquire new users at all costs. We’d love to see our DAU’s climb back to 500 on the app platform, reach 100 for the agent, and close a handful of API partners.
Clarify and prioritize the shipping that unlocks both of the previous two. We’ll measure this based on velocity of projects in intiatives, and also by taking stock of Eng morale.
Don’t be the blocker. Releases will go out and product will own any cleaning up any polish we uncover.
Focus relentlessly on differentiation and KISS. We’d love to see features that loop into others (E.g., “swap and stake”) driving more revenue)
The Strategy:
- Get any asset that you want.
- Earn Yield on anything you have.
- Discover and manage leverage.
- Use AI to automate boring stuff.
- Work with agents as customers.
As PTT says, revenue generating actions rules.
Current initiatives
Responsibilities
- Prioritize and adjust the roadmap with cross workstream alignment towards acquiring users market share, and thus, revenue
- Organizing and managing the initiatives on the roadmap, coordinating with engineering on timelines, communicating this openly.
- Analyzing and surfacing new market opportunities that are not listed yet in the roadmap, but reporting back to the community with more details.
- Testing what’s hitting the release queue, and owning the outcome if it wasn’t thoroughly polished.
- Product representation at the Weekly Ops Sprint.
- Facilitate office hours to provide updates on progress, report on performance for all initiatives, and offer space to the community to ask questions, give feedback, and pitch ideas.
- Draft product specs if needed, reviewing designs, work with ENG workstream to evaluate engineering resources, and iterate the feature development process.
- Steward business case docs into initiatives and their corresponding documentation.
- Hosting and Leading Spec kickoffs/spikes/breakdowns between Product and Engineering.
- Spinning up regular retros (at either phase completion or large feature completeness)
- Leading and continuing all scheduled team syncs and 1-on-1s.
- Managing Budget and workstream contributor payments made through Colony.
- Coordinating strategy sessions, touchpoint, and retros for launches. Facilitating where necessary.
Budget and team
Tl;dr Last terms 6 month budget was 279081. This 6 month is 242190; an 18% decrease YOY despite despite taking over the PR contract, two additional contractors, and translations. Despite this wild expansion of responsibility we’re still doing more with less.
Budget Breakdown of March 26- Aug 26
Request the full spreadsheet if you’d like.
Top line
People
The Product workstream will consist of 5 members, two full-time and 3 part time plus the translations team. Here is the total for the 6 months:
Discretionary:
PR firm for three months
Coinbase onramping service for two month experiment
current USDC: [$]13133 —> continue holding funds in colony using to pay contractors, and for surprise expenses
Miscellaneous
Due to an internal miscommunication, product will use its current FOX contingency funds to pay out the translations team for last month, and moving forward, will take over the rest of the team’s operations and team lead. See below for the SaaS list enabling prototype driven development for our initiatives.
Benefits -
- Realigns teams around shared goals and meets new customers where they are
- Focuses on attainable goals and a strong foundation
- Continues the track record of 0-to-1 and feature expansion work
- Unblocks engineering and ships initiatives that drive revenue instead of a bloated roadmap
- Executes quarterly with full transparency in office hours
- Much more shipping to capture market opportunities as they happen
Drawbacks -
- With a new way of operating, iterative, we’re not spending needless cycles polishing things for too little traction.
- additional USDC spend that wasn’t captured last month.
- Operating in an iterative, prototype-first model means some features may ship with less polish, potentially impacting user experience or requiring follow-up work.
- Taking on additional responsibilities from Marketing (translations, hosting, PR, BD) spreads the team thinner and increases operational complexity.
- Aggressive growth targets (15% QOQ revenue growth, 500 DAU) may be difficult to achieve given reduced budget and increased scope.
Vote:
For: Yes this is fine
For with changes: This is semi fine but i think it should include {X,y,z}
Against: No, thank you
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